Stardew Valley: The Board Game
Mar. 9th, 2025 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI was very excited when I walked into a con game room and saw the Stardew Valley board game on the table, because I love Stardew Valley and thought this had some real potential.
When we started reading the instructions Jethrien started getting concerned, because there are So. Many. Systems in this game; and plenty of them aren’t even explained in the main rulebook. There are more than a dozen different types of tokens and also a dozen different decks of cards. There’s a bag of fishing tokens and a bag of artifact tokens; there a system for fishing and a system for crab pots and a different system with its own deck for the mines and a farming system and a foraging system and a friendship system and tools you can upgrade and a whole setup for constructing buildings and buying animals. You have TEN goals, four from the Grandpa deck and then six Community Center bundles (which are hidden at the start and need to be revealed with friendship points). Oh, and there are four different sets of the produce and forage tiles (for each season) and four season decks with optional festival cards for replay value. They seriously tried to cram everything from the game into this and re-create the feeling of playing Stardew Valley multiplayer.
Besides the fact there were too many systems, too many of the rules for those systems were under-explained. We had to look up online how the hoe worked. We never figured out what the Spouse token was for. There were lots of items cards but we never actually got to the point where we got any of them; but we did end up carrying around fishing trash because it wasn’t clear if it ever had a purpose.
The game is for 1-4 players (you can play it solo or cooperatively), and it’s labeled as “45 minutes per player” as the play time which, given that it took us 90 minutes to get through setup and one season (with 4 players), seems optimistic. But even with the change of seasons and the various profession bonuses and upgraded tools, the game loop isn’t actually interesting enough to support 4-6 hours of gameplay, much less repeat plays.
I thought it was interesting to compare this against Minecraft Builders & Biomes, which was also a board game adaptation of a very open-ended video game with a big variety of systems, but that works incredibly well as a game. And I think the reason is because they picked a small number of mechanisms to mimic and built a fun game loop out of those, rather than trying to come up with an equivalent of every system in the video game.
Overall: I think Jethrien had much more fun complaining about the game (and was clearly very entertaining to the two other players as she did it) than she did with any aspect of actually playing. It’s just too overloaded with systems and randomness without creating a consistent and entertaining game loop. I’m glad we tried it, both for the experience and because now we know not to buy it.
When we started reading the instructions Jethrien started getting concerned, because there are So. Many. Systems in this game; and plenty of them aren’t even explained in the main rulebook. There are more than a dozen different types of tokens and also a dozen different decks of cards. There’s a bag of fishing tokens and a bag of artifact tokens; there a system for fishing and a system for crab pots and a different system with its own deck for the mines and a farming system and a foraging system and a friendship system and tools you can upgrade and a whole setup for constructing buildings and buying animals. You have TEN goals, four from the Grandpa deck and then six Community Center bundles (which are hidden at the start and need to be revealed with friendship points). Oh, and there are four different sets of the produce and forage tiles (for each season) and four season decks with optional festival cards for replay value. They seriously tried to cram everything from the game into this and re-create the feeling of playing Stardew Valley multiplayer.
Besides the fact there were too many systems, too many of the rules for those systems were under-explained. We had to look up online how the hoe worked. We never figured out what the Spouse token was for. There were lots of items cards but we never actually got to the point where we got any of them; but we did end up carrying around fishing trash because it wasn’t clear if it ever had a purpose.
The game is for 1-4 players (you can play it solo or cooperatively), and it’s labeled as “45 minutes per player” as the play time which, given that it took us 90 minutes to get through setup and one season (with 4 players), seems optimistic. But even with the change of seasons and the various profession bonuses and upgraded tools, the game loop isn’t actually interesting enough to support 4-6 hours of gameplay, much less repeat plays.
I thought it was interesting to compare this against Minecraft Builders & Biomes, which was also a board game adaptation of a very open-ended video game with a big variety of systems, but that works incredibly well as a game. And I think the reason is because they picked a small number of mechanisms to mimic and built a fun game loop out of those, rather than trying to come up with an equivalent of every system in the video game.
Overall: I think Jethrien had much more fun complaining about the game (and was clearly very entertaining to the two other players as she did it) than she did with any aspect of actually playing. It’s just too overloaded with systems and randomness without creating a consistent and entertaining game loop. I’m glad we tried it, both for the experience and because now we know not to buy it.
